


Portraits as Painted by the Universe

by Jacobi



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky thinks Steve is hilarious, Gen, Irish!Steve Rogers, Natasha knows all, Natasha the enigma, No Angst, Other, Philosophy, Prewar!stucky - Freeform, Recovery, The Fall - Freeform, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, Timeline, angry souls, minimal dialogue, three cheers for the women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23298046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobi/pseuds/Jacobi
Summary: Here is a portrait of a man meeting a god: he thinks, oh hello. And when he shakes the hand of the god, there is only the slight shock of electricity and then callouses on skin. You are just like me.Here is a portrait of a man meeting another man: the frame is smaller, because the other man is small. His personality makes up for it. Steve knows now that he was wrong about the god. The god was just like Bucky. This man, Steve argues with immediately. It’s like looking in the mirror. Another angry soul.One last portrait of a woman meeting a man (it’s a series, after all): Hello, beautiful. You don’t fool me at all.-Bucky and Steve orbit each other like planets unaware of their own gravity.-
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, James “Bucky” Barnes & Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark, Tony Stark/Pepper Potts, thor/jane
Kudos: 21





	Portraits as Painted by the Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is in a different style than I usually write, and more about the overarching story with little sparks from the characters. Also, some fun philosophy!

The boy who hits Bucky in the mouth is the same one Bucky pulled out of the river three days ago. "Ya just a filthy mongrel, ya mut!" It's the ring leader that spits this. The boy who's doing the hitting is just muscle. 

"Stay down!" He hisses. Bucky doesn't even try to put his hands up. He doesn't care anymore. Really, he doesn't. Let them break his whole face open, it doesn't matter. The terrifying thing is, Bucky Barnes just keeps getting back up. Like he likes it. Like he doesn't feel it. He looks at all the other boys in the eye each time and they balk. It's the look their father's have. Their mothers. Welcoming death. 

"Jus' leave, 'im, Rory, let's get outta here," The gang splits, leaving James Barnes slumped against the wall and the almost-drowned three days ago boy crouching in front of him. He's crying. Great big tears carving grimy stripes down his cheeks. 

"The hell's wrong with ya? The hell's wrong with ya?" 

Bucky grins a slow, concussed grin. "I figure," He says, "My Pa'll leave me alone if he sees the job done already." And then he starts crying too. He is eight years old and hasn't started growing yet. He's only just heard of Steve. In a few years, Bucky Barnes will be curb stomping with the best of them.

Steve Rogers watches the Barnes boy sulk at the back of the class. Nobody wants to play the lead in the class play. Everybody knows it should be Bucky. He's a lead boy, after all. "Gimme a tree." He grumbles. The new arts teacher who is too young and too optimistic to rightfully be teaching at a public school in Brooklyn smiles nervously. 

"What?" 

"I said," Bucky leans on the words. Steve likes the way he sounds, the inflection he puts on words. He's spent years trying to perfect that accent, to get rid of any trace of Irish he has in his own mouth; it's a waste of time. He tries, anyway. "Gimme the part of the tree." 

"There are no..." The art teacher clears her throat. "Well, let's everyone just, um, just read the play this weekend and we'll come back on Monday and decide. How about that?" A class full of sullen fourteen year olds. Nobody will read the play. 

Bucky and Steve orbit each other like planets unaware of their own gravity. Bucky thinks Steve is hilarious. He comes and stands over Steve's desk after class often, has been since elementary school. "Well? Let's see it," He demands. Only it isn't the demand of a bully. Steve will flip to the back of his notebook dutifully. A new caricature of the teacher and always, always, Bucky has to touch it before he can laugh, just to make sure he's really seeing it correctly. Steve loves the way Bucky speaks. He holds his voice carefully in his head and mouths along on his walk home. 

Get outta here, gimme the tree, hold on now I ain't ever seen math like that

It's like waking up, how they fall into friendship. Waking up and looking over and the boy you've known since elementary school has now known you long enough to know the sum of most of your parts and hasn't fought you about it yet so, logically, he is now your friend. 

Bucky forces the art teacher to make him the part of a tree, even though there is no tree in the play. Steve volunteers himself for the role of stage crew immediately. The class play is like nothing the Brooklyn community has ever seen. Two girls play Romeo and Juliette. The painted scenery is incredibly detailed- and the tree. The tree. The talk of the town is the tree. He's in every scene and he falls asleep in the first act standing up. He's painted brown from head to toe and there's a single stick taped to his shirt. That Barnes boy, the community will remember years later, do you remember when he stole the show as a goddamned tree? 

Steve has never said Bucky's name out loud. There hasn't ever been a reason to. Bucky always comes to him and anyway, it's a personal thing, to call another guy over by his name. What if they're just friendly acquaintances instead of friends? The line is a fine one. Bucky crosses it at lunch on the first day of high school. 

"What's the deal with that freak?" One of the older boys on the football team nods toward Steve. "He's what, four feet tall?" 

"He's not a freak," Bucky says calmly. He's a lead boy, even as a freshman. He doesn't understand social boundaries because he doesn't have to. "He's just small." A perfectly acceptable answer. Steve will never understand it because he didn't hear the conversation, but the football team never antagonizes him. Ever. It's the regular run of the mill rich kids that give him grief. Boys from uptown, barley Brooklyn. They don't know how the air tastes on hot days with no air conditioning, they don't know how to love crooked cobblestones and drunk fathers. 

"Hey Barnes!" This, from George. His watch costs more than Bucky's younger brother's hospital bill from when he broke his arm falling from the fire escape. Already, the Barnes boys have bad luck with heights. The Universe made Bucky afraid of them, a built in defense against them. It's no use, won't be any use later on, but she tried. He smiles an easy smile. George is one of the nice ones. Oblivious, but not malicious about the money. His father is a doctor. Bucky thinks there's a lot of money in medicine. He couldn't ever be a doctor himself, but his sister Becca might have it in her. 

"Hey, Barnes," This, from Luke. Bucky doesn't like Luke. He gives another easy smile anyway, pretends to be rushing to class. Luke grabs his arm. Here is a portrait of one boy grabbing another: clean fingernails on warm skin, an unstoppable force changing trajectory. "You coming to my party Friday night?" Bucky is 15 and Luke is 17, but Luke thinks Bucky is a charity case and Bucky thinks Luke is an idiot. 

"Probably not," Bucky hedges. "My younger siblings, they're a handful..." He isn't lying, exactly. Tommy and Becca and Henry and Rachel are a handful. 

Luke looks at Bucky's slightly frayed shirt and his worn shoes for the first time that day. The second time is when Bucky socks him in the mouth for pushing Steve against the bricks of the school's exterior. Bucky is supposed to be going to football practice, he's walking down the steps with his cleats in hand, George a little farther before him and already hailing the Taxi to take them to the off campus field. It's not very far away, Bucky usually walks, but he'll take the cab if he's with George, because George always pays. 

"Irish mick," Bucky hears Luke say, a sneer on his voice. So he looks over his shoulder, because Joe is Irish, and Steve, and he himself is Irish-Italian. He doesn't think, he just swings on Luke as easy as anything, says nothing, and catches the cab with George before anyone says anything. 

George eyes Bucky's right hand, cradled in his lap. The knuckles are an angry red from where they met with Luke's teeth. "You're crazy, learn to hit before you break your hand, huh? Coach'll have your head and mine too." 

"Don't worry," Bucky flashes a grin. "I'm left handed." 

Joe is one of Bucky's greatest friends. He's Irish through and through. Red hair and words that dip and lean and jump at the ends. Bucky grew up playing stickball in the street with him and his brothers and Bucky and Bucky's brothers. Both the eldest in their families, except Joe is a year older and loves Becca like nothing else. Bucky would kill him for it, if he wasn't so sweet about it and Becca didn't laugh so hard about it. 

"Jamie, yer sister still datin' th' creep frum two deers down? Dunna how I'll live if she don't notice me soon enough, huh?" Joe calls over at Bucky. He's already at the field, tossing a ball with one of the managers. The thing about the McMullen boys is, most Irish get jumped for being Irish. Except Joe and his brothers, they decided to do the jumping themselves and flat refused to speak differently from their parents just to prove it. 

"He's not a creep." 

"He is so, an I'll tell ye what's more n' that, I'm not a creep so's I'd be thankful fer ya t' tell Becca that yerself." 

"How 'bout you wait a few years, Jesus. You're a good three years older than her, Joe." George rolls his eyes. He is well used to hearing the exchanges about Bucky's sister. Becca is a bit of a legend on the team, for how much Joe talks about her. Nobody thought anything of it until they saw Bucky, and then the rumors of her beauty almost made sense. 

Joe shrugs. "Me? I'm in no hurry. Just in love, I tell ye, you never known love 'till ye see a lass lay flat a boy cheatin' a' cards." 

"Joe, you just gotta give it up," Bucky shakes his head and laces up his cleats. "She decked Owen 'cause he called her out for cheating, and she was. She's a filthy cheat at cards." Nearly conned him out of a dollar, once. Bucky never played for bets with her again. 

Steve lets himself into his apartment with a black eye and a bloody nose and it kills his Ma, he's sure. Her own son a murder. She wouldn't ever say a thing, but somehow she had hoped that her little Irish boy wouldn't be so little and Irish. Except here he comes through the door with the badges of his heritage given by a high school boy. "S'okay, Ma," Steve tells her. "Bucky got 'im back." 

"Ye do good t' stay 'round this Bucky, then, yeah?" Sarah only knows of one Bucky and his last name is Barnes. His brother came into the hospital with a broken arm and a toothy smile. The parents weren't the ones that attended him to the waiting room. It was a whole range of siblings, and at the head: Bucky. The tree from years passed. 

"And what's the matter with your hand?" Rachel stands, at eleven, with her arms crossed looking just like their mother. 

"Hush, before Ma hears you." Bucky throws her a look. "Just a football accident." The truth is, Bucky jammed three fingers hitting Luke and Joe pulled them all out, vowing to teach Bucky how to hit properly with each tug. His hand is swollen and sore. These are the spoils of freedom. 

"S'a good thing you're left handed." Tommy looks on. 

"You shut up, too. How's the math coming along?" 

"Just as well as your-"

"Hey!" Becca interrupts, dancing through the crowded entryway. 

"Hot date?" Bucky asks. 

"None of your goddamn business." She replies cheerfully. They both know exactly where she's headed. A fourteen year old fixer, off to the workers’ union to collect their father and then to the bar, where she’ll actually find him.

"None of your goddamn business." Parrots six year old Henry. 

Tommy fixes him with a look. "Clean up your mouth." The irony of age. 

So, Bucky and Steve, they fall into friendship. Steve can't tell, sometimes, if Bucky is just doing it for laughs. At night in the dark with a headache, an ugly part of him often wonders if Bucky goes to football practice and talks about him. The truth is, Bucky is in it for laughs and he does go to football practice and talk about Steve. But, like most things about Bucky, that's all it is. Face value equating to the real value. He thinks Steve is hilarious, loves his cartoons, and he tells Joe about them and their artist during warmups to fill in dead air Joe would otherwise be using to ask after Becca. 

Here is a portrait of a young man as a lead in his own life: the hemlines of his clothes are slightly threadbare, but his smile is genuine. He looks around, wondering innocently why people stop to stare. Does he have something on his face? The easy answer is no. The complicated one is yes. But this young man is not complicated. Miraculously, he comes from a home of hard loving and soft arguments. He has no complexes piling up behind his eyes. He's no tragic bad boy. Bucky Barnes loves science. 

Here is a portrait of a young man miscast as a supporting character: he is little, but not as little as people say. It's just that his friend is so much taller. He is capable and knows it, an excellent artist. But he's hungry. Hungry for food and a way out. It won't always be like this, he can feel it in the way he sees shimmering people, made full of life and bright and shining. They don't live very long, those people. It scares him to the core that Bucky shimmers; it scares him to the core that he himself doesn't even spark in sunlight. Steve will live a very long time because that's what supporting characters do. 

The Universe made a mistake, though. She gave Bucky science and dark hair. She gave Steve dyslexia and a stubborn streak. She made one too good and one too mad, distilled them down to absolutes. Opposite ends of a magnet. So, they stuck. So, one of them would outlive the other, except the balance would be wrong then, so the Universe gave Bucky one more trick to go with his love of science fiction novels from the drug store: immortality. One do-over. A backup life just in case. Most would use it after living out a full life. Bucky uses his at age 19. 

He survives the fall. Maybe it's whatever they put in him that didn't make him big like Steve but made him heal the same. Faster, even. Paper cuts and bullet wounds, what's the difference, now? Or maybe it's because he didn't fall straight down. He hit the cliff with his shoulder and started rolling, tumbling, crashing down. A human avalanche landing busted and broken and flat on his back in the bottom of the ravine. He says one word, looking up at the sky with eyes blinded by a headache and a cracked skull. It's a name and it's not Steve's. "Becca?" 

Becca is gone in the war, a week before Bucky falls, blown up in a field hospital in Italy tending to the men missing more of their body than should be survivable. But Bucky doesn't know that, and so to him, she is alive. She will always be alive and the fixer of things, and he thinks he sees her standing over him and then sitting down beside him. Here is a portrait of a young man as a brother: it is not the name of the other half of his soul that he calls for. It is the name of a sister. 

Steve drinks. He drinks and drinks and drinks. Swallows down heartache and has it coming right back up in five minutes as soon as the liquor burns off through his system. "You love him." Peggy says. Present tense. She knows you don't stop loving when the other half is gone. Steve sighs. 

"That matters least." He says, because it does and he knows love is something that won't save people. You can't live on love, you can only die on it. Here is a portrait of a young man as a soldier: he's finally rounded out his vowels. American English is heavy to chew, and it makes his jaw tired. He wakes up in the middle of the night and he doesn't scream, he just looks, looks for the man he almost wrenched from death the first time over. He knows it's pointless, though. Steve Rogers is not a savior. He was just born mad. You can’t live off of anger, you can only survive. 

Bucky survives because he was meant to survive. Surviving does not equate living. It is not pretty. It is bones and blood, just skeleton-stuff and screams. When is a young man no longer a young man? Perhaps he hardens over night. Bucky will never know. He doesn’t have the memories. 

Here is a portrait of a man meeting a god: he thinks, oh hello. And when he shakes the hand of the god, there is only the slight shock of electricity and then callouses on skin. You are just like me. 

Here is a portrait of a man meeting another man: the frame is smaller, because the other man is small. His personality makes up for it. Steve knows now that he was wrong about the god. The god was just like Bucky. This man, Steve argues with immediately. It’s like looking in the mirror. Another angry soul. 

One last portrait of a woman meeting a man (it’s a series, after all): Hello, beautiful. You don’t fool me at all. 

Age and experiences that age a person, years tumbled into days and back again. The angry souls commiserate in a lab belonging to one with music belonging to another. “My father wouldn’t fuckin shut up about you.” Tony says, unscrewing a plate. Steve is the only one he trusts to hold the light, the only one he trusts to survive the fallout of human and machine alike. He survived Tony’s father, after all. What’s a son but a watered down copy, anyway? 

“Funny,” Steve says, even though it’s not funny. He says a lot of things he doesn’t mean nowadays. Master of slippery words and American English. His jaw got stronger. “I hate science.” 

“So you hate yourself?” Brown eyes meet blue and a thunderstorm without a god’s interference erupts. Too close to home, and the hurt feels good. The truth feels good. Two angry souls, laughing, surviving, in spite of it all. 

Natasha holds Steve’s hand and nobody questions it. They don’t want to look at her wrong and get their hands held, too. Steve can’t escape her. It’s an old truth: the strongest man in the world is no match for a woman. The Universe is a woman. Sampson in the Bible found that our first hand. She giveth and she taketh away. “Hello, trouble.” Natasha calls him many things, true things. Beautiful, trouble, Steve. She holds his hand. 

“I’m no trouble at all.” Steve smiles. She’s found him back at the museum, staring at the video feed of a young man who isn’t anything anymore. Not yet. For Steve, the Universe was one woman. But Atlas, Atlas was just a boy. “He was trouble.” Steve nods toward Bucky. Natasha notices for the first time that there are two different birth dates for James Barnes. He was working on becoming a myth since he came into the world. 

“Are either of these correct?” Natasha runs her fingers over the dates. Steve squeezes her hand softly, a half smile on his face. The other half is on the mouth of the young man in the looped video. What do his lips form? The silent words: we are friends! 

“No. He was born on Christmas Day, 1917.” 

“Why March 10?” Natasha asks. 

“That was Becca’s birthday, they mixed them up, her day with his year. He always said, ‘I was born when my sister was’. It was an expression.” 

They both watch the smile on Bucky’s face disappear as the video loops again. So many expressions lost in time. 

A piece of the Universe dies with Peggy Carter. Luckily, there are enough women in the world to carry the loss. She is born again in the spark of a little girl’s eyes in Mongolia. Maybe Steve will meet her again. Probably not. Natasha holds his hand. 

The Winter Soldier was never an angry thing. It feels off balance constantly, the pull of a metal arm on a human skeleton, the pull of the other half of a soul it didn’t know it still had. It looks at the man under its knife and thinks, suddenly: oh, hello you little Irish mick. It becomes a man again, briefly. The recognition of how hot anger burns. How hot Brooklyn summers can be. How much you can love crooked cobblestones and a drunk father. 

“Bucky.”

Who? 

“Steve.” Oh. 

Here is a portrait of a man reborn: the past pulls on him heavily. So does the present. Two lives in one head. Is this the price of immortality? It used to be a nickel for a coffee, swollen knuckles for freedom. Again, Bucky does not say Steve’s name. “Becca?” 

Rebecca Barnes eats candy in the fabric of the Universe next to Peggy Carter and looks at her brother from the invisibility of memory. The fixer of things. 

Becca fixed their family every time their father tried to punch a hole straight through it. Fixed toys and torn clothing. The girls Bucky couldn’t get rid of. Joe’s broken heart. Steve’s broken nose. The table when Henry and Tommy bowled into it and knocked the leg loose.

Becca kisses her brother’s face with the wind. He took her birthday. She’ll fix another thing for him. “Here’s your heart,” She gives it to him in Steve’s eyes. “You lent it to me the day I was born, it’s time I gave it back.” She won’t fix his life for him, she doesn’t hate him that much. 

Here is a portrait of a man in denial: “Hell no.” It was an accident, he looked at Natasha wrong and she held his hand. “I’m not telling you my soul.” 

Here is a portrait of the Universe in a woman: “You don’t have to, James. I already know it. You don’t fool me.” 

Becca? Bucky thinks, exasperated. Becca and Peggy chew on taffy in a world made of shine and shimmer and laugh. 

You can die on love, you can survive on anger. So what does that leave for you to live on? 

The god lives on ale and a woman called Jane and a wayward brother with a nasty ambition of world domination. The genius billionaire playboy philanthropist lives on whatever Pepper Potts decides; she’s done a good job so far. Bucky and Steve live on Pioneer Street in Red Hook, not far from coffee park. 

Nobody knows what Natasha lives on. The Universe does, but she has yet to paint Natasha’s portrait. She’ll need some more red paint.


End file.
